Sketchy Ideas » pittsburgh

Not because…

Aditya Lesmana — Tue, 18 May 2010 04:30:27 +0000

I am unhappy.

Not because it is too easy.

Who does not like easy stuff?

Not because it is too hard.

I do not avoid hard work… I love hard work.

I am unhappy because it is useless

“It’s xzy Baby”

Aditya Lesmana — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:53:26 +0000

Have been wandering into several cities over years of my life, I could go into lengthy ,but socially unfavorable, debate on “city X is not bad, its just different” statement. Indeed some cities are poised to be better in certain aspect than the others or more attractive to … (vain/busy/active/others) people like me.

In any case, based on recent conversation in the car I sat in, I will share one litmust test to separate cities that might excite you from the others gloomy piece of lands. The test can be sum up in one sentence:

“It’s ” + + ” Baby!”

Use the above term to test for various cities that might excite you. For example:

“It’s NYC Baby!”

If you feel that the sentence makes sense and rather apt, than probably it is.

However, change the city into something more dreadful:

“It’s Pittsburgh Baby!”

If you feel that all hope are lost and you want to give up on life upon hearing of uttering such sentence, indeed the city mentioned may not be for you.

Now I am wondering what the city of Vancouver is for me.

Yes I am at Vancouver now and its not for paralympic games

Past 30 days in one chart

Aditya Lesmana — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:38:54 +0000

Many people do not believe whenever I say life in Pittsburgh is slow. Well… mostly yes and a bit of no.

So here is what happened for the past 30 days.

Representation of what happened for the past 30 days

Oh well

How Do I Keep Myself Updated

Aditya Lesmana — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:02:40 +0000

At first, I want to write ‘How Do I Keep Myself Well Updated Despite The Fact That I Live Twelve Time Zones Away From Many Things That Are Dear To Me Without Wasting Too Much Time and Being Perceived as Stalker’. However, two years in Singapore Management University had taught me two important lessons (among many others):

keep it simple (read: do not bulls*it too much)
Stop at #1 and if possible, make it simpler

So there goes the wonderfully long title…

Back to the real business, a friend of mine asked me:

“Do you keep yourself updated of what happened here?” – NNs, quote has been heavily modified (read: sanitized)

Apparently that friend of mine was amazed at how I immediate know about series of earthquakes that jolt Indonesia, Singapore’s new buzzwordz thatz involvedz SHINGZ and BOOMZ and of course superb juicy stories about XYZ’s new relationship status and even more juicier stories about XYZ’s newer relationship status ;p

In short, I got plenty of ways to keep connected without actually spending too much time yet people still label me as stalker – especially when they could not comprehend how to do what I have done. Drats… I will discuss them later somehow but for this post, let’s keep it simple (read: I don’t have much time).

One of my favorite ways is Twitter.

To the uninitiated, Twitter is a digg-like site powered mostly by clueless individuals… millions of them who desperately want to share their 140 characters worth of wisdom.

(I really have something to do at 0246 in the morning so…)

This is how I use twitter.

How Do I Keep Myself Updated

Basically I only observe four columns

My friends
Anything that mentions my name
Anything that mentions “Indonesia”
Anything that mentions “Singapore”

From those four columns and occasional cursory checking, I could gather pretty much stuff that I want to know. Coupled with a bit of background knowledge and some sort of farfetch reasoning and rather flawed analytical skills, I could pretty much gather a lot of data to start a rather meaningful conversations*. Of course some discretion is needed to prevent me from reaching ‘creepy’ zone.

*ps: the one that does not involved “How are you?” and “How’s the weather there?”

How do you keep yourself updated?